Re: Are gzip-compressed substitutes still used?

[zimoun <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Vagrant,

On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 at 11:08, Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org> wrote:

> ... and I would expect this version to ship in Debian for another ~3-5
> years, unless it gets removed from Debian bullseye before the upcoming
> (real soon now) release!

I could miss a point.  In 3-5 years, some people will be still running
Debian stable (or maybe oldstable or maybe this stable is LTS), so they
will “apt install guix” at 1.2.0, right?  But then there is no guarantee
that Berlin will still serve this 5 years old binary substitutes.  But
“guix install” fallback by compiling what is missing, right?  Then the
question will be: are the upstream sources still available?  Assuming
that SWH is still alive at this future, all the git-fetch packages will
have their source, whatever the upstream status.  For all the other
methods, there is no guarantee.

On the other hand, at this 3-5 years future, after “apt install guix”,
people will not do “guix install” but instead they should do “guix
pull”.  Therefore, the compression of substitutes does not matter that
much, right?

The only strong backward compatibility seems between “guix pull” rather
than all the substitutes themselves.  Isn’t it?  Other said, at least
keep all the necessary to have “guix pull” at 1.2.0 be able to complete.


Thanks for this opportunity to think at such time scale. :-)


Cheers,
simon